Virginia aims to force hiring of conservative professors

The US state of Virginia is coming close to imposing governance changes across all of its public colleges and universities to force the hiring of politically conservative professors, in what a nationwide alliance of campus trustees has put forth as a potential nationwide model.

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s governor and a Republican backer of Donald Trump, plans by July to have installed a majority of the members of the boards of visitors across all but three of the state’s 15 four-year institutions, with more to come.

A chief objective, according to his state secretary of education, Aimee Rogstad Guidera, is to install politically like-minded faculty at the institutions.

“The mere presence of a conservative professor on campus will empower all professors to speak freely,” Ms Guidera told a recent conference organised by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a forum for promoting conservative voices in post-secondary leadership.

The group’s president is Michael Poliakoff, a former vice-president for academic affairs and research at the University of Colorado. Dr Poliakoff said in an interview that he backed the general approach, which has been practised most notably in recent months by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis.

Dr Poliakoff said he feared that universities put too much emphasis on racial diversity in hiring, and recruit too few students from rural parts of the US. “These strike me as deficiencies, and I’m really pleased that Governor Glenn Youngkin and his secretary of education are actually taking this seriously,” he added. “It’s my intellect, it’s my heart, that matters – not my skin colour or my ethnicity,” he said.

Virginia and Florida are among several US states, including Texas, where Republican-led governors are using their powers to appoint members of university governing boards to impose political viewpoints on their campuses.

Those appointed by Mr Youngkin – and celebrated by Ms Guidera at the ACTA-organised event – include Lindsey Burke, the director of education policy at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who was named to the board of George Mason University.

As in the other states, the presidents of public universities in Virginia have largely avoided offering public criticisms of such moves. Mr Youngkin has established a policy – new among Virginia governors – of meeting every three months with the state’s university presidents to make clear his political intent for reshaping their operations, Ms Guidera said.

Dr Poliakoff, in his interview after the conference, stressed his commitment to freedom of speech and repeatedly advocated data-informed policy debates, while also endorsing Ms Guidera’s assessment that higher education needed to be forcibly bent towards the greater acceptance of conservative voices.

He said he based his belief in the need for a pro-conservative correction in US higher education on survey data in which professors have self-reported their political affiliations. He said his own college professors decades ago likely also held left-of-centre beliefs but did not let those opinions show in the classroom, and he acknowledged that he had no clear data showing whether and how that might be different now.

The problem of political interference in higher education has probably always existed to some extent, and should be avoided, said Roderick McDavis, who was the first black president of Ohio University and is now a managing principal at AGB Search, which focuses on higher education leadership.

“I don’t know that a board should be political,” said Dr McDavis. “I think what a board has to do is try to stay above the politics and really focus on what’s in the best interest of the education of the students, of the institution.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com